Chapter 2- Hell
At 13, Lisa Beaufort watched her parents’ coffins sink into a fresh grave, surrounded by so few people after all. Were they really mourning the couple’s death in a car accident? The crowds attending Gilles and Kyoko Beaufort’s funeral were merely fulfilling an unpleasant and tedious duty, which always left that bitter taste we can only hope to forget: that of the proximity of death. They were work colleagues, friends and relatives, almost anonymous cousins; others were classmates or sports club mates; all attended the funeral with bored restraint and hushed whispers; trivialities to restore death to its most desired place: that of an event which for the most part concerned them, but which they wished only to evacuate from their lives as quickly as possible.
Did those closest to them and affected by the tragedy also weep for the two children, now without family? No aunts, uncles or grandparents had been able or willing to take them in.
Above the hole – what was it Nietzsche said? « When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you?” – a single gaze did not stare at the grave with feigned or clumsy devotion, poorly concealing boredom and the whirlwind of the most superficial worries. Elena Beaufort, the elder of the two children, shed no tears. She had already dried up the flow.
Her bright brown eyes, the eyes of a seventeen-year-old teenager who had become the eldest child in an amputated family, were turned skyward. If it could have been sentient, if God could have existed, if life could simply have been something other than an absurd, meaningless flow from birth to death, she would have set the heavens ablaze with her gaze. Then she too would surely have contemplated the gates of paradise ablaze, declaiming like Nero:
« Ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse”.
« And one day, I’ll be able to live, at last, like a human being ».
Beside her, her youngest daughter was shedding hot tears, her red hair bursting in the August sun, fluttering in the crisp, warm air. Only in the movies does the sky cry with sad children.
At 14, Lisa was learning to make sense of words she’d never expressed, her mute mourning transformed into drawings, watercolors and prints. Like her elder sister, she was gifted with a prodigious memory; above all, she had a real talent for the arts, and found comfort in them. All this time, Elena had been fighting to gain her emancipation: to finally have the right to look after her sister and escape the waltz of DDASS centers and foster homes; a battle won. She thought, almost without daring to believe it, that life could finally begin again. She hoped to turn her passion for dance into a profession.
One evening, in a college backyard, and that vague à l’âme that had never left Lisa. Who could speak of naiveté or a choice never assumed, who could say which mistake was the first and why? With the syringe on the floor, the ecstasy begins. Heroin is a sweet cocoon of pleasure that annihilates and reduces all pain and regret to nothing under its chemical signals. Artificial peace and more: pure bliss by injection. She had just opened the door to hell.
At 15, Lisa was trying everything to stop. She’d tried to hide it from everyone for as long as possible, but such secrecy doesn’t last very long when a hunger more devouring than the cruelest forced fast devoured her guts and relentlessly chewed up her every thought. No one can claim to stop such a drug by sheer willpower and choice.
Elena soon learns about detox centers, social services and psychologists; and about guilt. Shouldn’t she have played the role she pretended to play? Wasn’t it her fault that her sister was shooting up and caught stealing? No matter how hard she gritted her teeth, the more she fought for her youngest daughter, the more her heart knotted, crossing out her own dreams of a peaceful life at last. Every month that passed was dictated by a single objective, always deferred to the future: getting Lisa out of this hell.
By the age of 16, Lisa was lying better and better; enough to fool those around her and her guardians, and for Elena to believe, at times, that it was finally all over. But lying is so easy at someone who lives only to believe that hell will finally end, that life will return to normal! All the girl had to do was not get caught, and she became an expert in the game of deception. Scruples weighed nothing against the howl of need and the call of chemical precursors against heroin cravings.
Even the three rapes she was still able to keep quiet about, but by dint of lies and dissimulations, she was tearing her heart out to veil the truth, with no hope of stopping the ineluctable mechanism that was killing all trust between her and her sister. The slightest fact became doubtful, the slightest fear turned into anguish; and who could have said which of the two was living in the worst hell?
At 17, Lisa couldn’t hide her game any longer. Prison, social services once again, but also cruel and atrocious words, not against her but in sentence against her sister. Elena was the eldest, she had failed to play the role; whether this was true or not, it had weighed nothing against the coldness of the lawyers, the judges: she was guilty, there was no turning back now. But there’s no going back when you love; you can only unwind the thread that binds you to others until you find how to tear it off; and whatever you tear off can only be done with the greatest suffering.
Lisa managed to escape from the rehab center where she’d been locked up, and broke into her own sister’s apartment, taking almost everything that could be exchanged for a bit of dope, without a single thought for Elena or the consequences. His wandering didn’t last long, and ended in a squat, one of those places that serve as a safe haven for all those whom humanity rejects, a last overused syringe rolling around on the floor.
This is how it should have ended, and at the end of this hell, everyone knows that death awaits, at the end of the decay.
***
She was 17; she should have died that night; but she slept on a soft mat, covered with a sheet whose fabric she wouldn’t have recognized. A thin chain padlocked to the bars of the cage that enclosed her joined, like a leash, the ring of a steel collar around her neck. She could only have held on to it on her knees.
She didn’t know how she’d ended up there. Had she been conscious, all she could have done was reaffirm what she had already painfully understood over the past two weeks: she was no longer on Earth; and she was alive.
Above her, while she didn’t wake up despite the commotion around her, Abba watched, looking rather displeased; but he said nothing. Only the bulging muscles of his colossal arms, with biceps even larger than the size of the little thing in the cage, betrayed his darkened mood with their twitching.
“You fucked her up, didn’t you, » he finally blurted out, breaking the silence.
He was addressing the shirtless, pot-bellied man standing proudly with his arms crossed beside him. Dressed in the fashion of western Athémaïs, he wore the same kind of sarouel as Abba, but there ended any possibility of comparison. In fabric quality alone, one of the giant’s silk belts could have paid for all of his colleague’s finery, sword and overly ornate dagger included. Batsu was not only far less wealthy than Abba, but he also seemed to strive to compete with the grime and filth of the worst workers on the city’s docks, which ultimately fitted in quite well with the surrounding décor. The Cages Market was teeming with people in an incessant hubbub, to which was added the pungent stench of bodies and the tidal effluvia of the lagoon struck by the summer sun. It was hot, and the perspiration of thousands of captives in the pens of the huge market, a veritable city within a city located directly on the main port of Armanth Bay, saturated the air to the point of being almost unbreathable.
The quays and alleys of the Cage Market stretched almost as far as the human eye could see; and as far as it did, there were ships of every size, wooden buildings and pens. Thousands of slaves from all over the world were locked up in them, ready to embark on the ships, either by sea or via the land routes of the levitating ship. For a man of the High Art, the other name for slavery according to Lossyans, this was the biggest market imaginable, and the High Season market was held once a year. Even merchants from the Hegemony stopped off here to buy the slaves on which their empire depended.
While Abba naturally had to take part in such an event for his own trade – and he himself had pens full of captives ready for sale – he was mainly there today to try, as he had been doing regularly for almost ten years, to find that strange rare pearl that Jawaad was stubbornly searching for.
The Batsu Trading House was in the low-end slave trade. It did little training, didn’t care much for High Art, which it knew nothing about, and did most of its business in supplying convicts for use as laborers in building sites and mines. Even though levitation engines are very useful for moving heavy loads, and explosives are used more often in Armanth than elsewhere for quarrying and ore extraction, no one in Loss would have the idea or the means to do without slaves. That Batsu had found and put on sale a rather pretty redheaded barbarian who would no doubt be destined for domestic service or pleasure was therefore quite unusual; it wasn’t his market at all.
But from their discussion, Abba had just realized that Batsu himself had decided to personally train this girl. Her back had been ploughed by the whip and it wouldn’t go away without expensive care. He’d also come to the conclusion that, after the brutal treatment Batsu had put her through in the fortnight since he’d redeemed her, chances were her mind wouldn’t recover either. A waste, which as a rule meant destroying unusable merchandise and, out of charity, shortening her needless suffering.
“I told you I had a trick up my sleeve for that fat, arrogant mora Priscius; I got the idea straight away when I saw her with the tattoo on her breast. It’s ideal, he’ll think I’ve found a girl from House Thuna, she’ll pay my debt and I wish him good luck doing anything with it, now!”
Cruel, inhuman, clever. Abba had to admit it, and he knew that Batsu had a debt to settle with a luxury slave trader who was particularly ill-regarded in the trade for his demands and pride. He undoubtedly deserved to be called a mora, the name of a kind of domestic mammalian pig; but as a slave trader, himself respectful of the High Art, the colossus had a certain horror of this kind of practice.
“And how did you find her?”
Abba detailed the young woman as he asked his question, restraining himself from responding to invective between merchant and customer a few feet away, to silence them. A simple evil glance at the scene and the sudden tension in his muscles had much the same effect. There weren’t many people who didn’t suddenly become very polite and measured when Abba glared at them. In any case, there weren’t many people at all to compete with his corpulence and musculature.
“I bought her in Ras’al-Aneth from a couple of market gardeners for a song. I must say, she’d been pretty sick and completely drugged up or something; she had to be weaned off the drugs. They assured me they hadn’t given her anything; they’d found her naked in their fields, barely conscious, the day before, when I was stopping off before coming to the Market.”
“Naked and alone, lost near a village? Did you hear her talk?”
“Yeah, and not just a little! She was screaming and fighting like hell at first.”
Abba bent over to turn the girl onto her back; she didn’t wake up, but twitched in terror in her sleep. She was rather tiny, much smaller than most lossyannes; from a distance, she would easily have been mistaken for a child. And skinny as a rail; she must have been starving, which didn’t surprise Abba; it was one of the obligatory steps to subdue a captive in order to train her. But in general, no slaver worthy of the name would have made this treatment last as long as it did.
On her left breast, there was a very fine, detailed drawing of a gold and red orchid, with fine foliage mixed with green and blue. A magnificent tattoo, the finesse of which must have required long, patient work, not to mention the talent of the tattooist. He wouldn’t have admitted it to his colleague, but he’d never seen such a successful, detailed tattoo in his entire career. Technically speaking, he’d have even persuaded himself that it was impossible; and even if it had been, one didn’t tattoo a slave unless she already had other assets justifying such an expense. Now, this girl was far too puny and devoid of the charms of a pleasure slave to be worth such finery; but he was beginning to get idea. Besides, she was a redhead. Her long, silky hair flamboyantly spread out in the little cage. All lossyans know that being red-headed means death, or enslavement; there were few places where this law didn’t apply, not only for fear of the Ordinatorii of the Council Church and the punishments they reserved for offenders daring to hide a red-headed person; but even more so for fear of coming face to face with a Loss Singer. Redheads were therefore particularly rare.
Abba sat up, letting the girl sleep. She was exhausted; he wondered if she would even survive her treatment. He turned back to Batsu, raising his voice slightly over the ambient din, which didn’t wake the captive:
“Did you know the language?”
“Uh… no, but you know, me, apart from Athémaïs and a bit of Eteoclian slang… Anyway, I didn’t need to understand her language to know that she was insulting and pleading and all that kind of stuff; just the usual.”
Abba snorted. Batsu’s story resembled the way you’d sometimes find lost earthlings, wandering around naked without knowing how to speak a Lossyan language, near a village or community. Earthlings were rare to find themselves stranded on Loss. In general, their arrival was seen as some kind of positive omen and gift; especially if they were redheaded girls. Their lot wasn’t much different from any other earthling the Lossyans found. They too were enslaved; the paradox is that while redheads are much sought-after and desired as slaves, everyone fears the possibility that she might then be a Loss Singer. If the High Art had been created centuries ago, it was indeed specifically for this purpose: to totally and definitively enslave any potential Singer, so that her power, should it awaken, would serve the Lossyans, and not enslave them. That was the formula. All Lossyans superstitiously respected this Dogma of the Church, and Abba was no exception in this respect, even though he had very rarely seen any Loss Singers. Still, he asked, you never know:
“Could she be an Earth girl?”
“Could be, but what does it matter? I’ll leave the trouble to Priscius, and I expect him to have as much of it as possible! If it’s one of those Loss Singer demons and it blows up in his face, even better!”
“The chances of that happening are, as far as I know, so thin that you shouldn’t count on it; but it might interest me. What price would you ask?”
Batsu made a theatrically disappointed pout, which sounded as false as a cracked gong.
“Ha, I can’t help you there, my friend. I’ve given Priscius an appointment for tomorrow to come and take delivery. Listen, I owe him a big debt and you know how insistent that son of a bitch can be when you owe him something. He’s agreed to let me pay with a fancy girl and I’ve got one just for him.”
There was something sickening about Batsu’s carpet-selling smile that Abba found hard to hide. While he, too, was hardly friendly with the slaver to whom his colleague was obliged, he didn’t like the latter either; and Abba found it hard not to slap people he didn’t like. He was about to insist when a clamor broke out a few steps away. Batsu let out a series of improbable expletives, and ran off to see what was going on. From a distance – and from up high, he could look down on the crowd by an average of two heads, effortlessly – Abba could see that a fight had broken out in a captive pen, and the men inside were not faking it. There would undoubtedly be deaths.
Batsu was already heading there, unhooking his whip from his belt, imitated by his henchmen. He turned to Abba, shouting:
“But if you want her, buy her back from Priscius! If you can negotiate with that fat mora!”
“You know perfectly well he’s going to piss me off!”
Batsu let out a thunderous laugh as he walked off to help his men:
“It’s because I know that that I want to get rid of him!”
Abba grumbled, and had to restrain himself sternly from making his colleague swallow his arrogance with a beating; but starting another brawl in the middle of the cages, when the atmosphere was already electric enough, was the best way to end up with a general riot, and the slaver wasn’t particularly keen on having Batsu’s henchmen on his back as reinforcements either.
At least he knew what Batsu was going to do with the girl and who he was going to buy her from. Turning, he began to move forward against the tide of the crowd who were rushing to watch the pugilism in the cages nearby; more attracted by the spectacle than by any willingness to lend a hand in restoring order. But after three unlucky people had collided with or jostled Abba, and were suddenly turned into bowling pins thrown to the sides by a colossal arm as disdainful as it was powerful, the crowd in question began to find it more prudent to duck out of the way of the giant and his clearly massacring mood.
Abba grinned, however, as he left the furnace of the market to find some shade and a drink. He would describe his find to Jawaad and leave him to it, if he was interested. Priscius had a reputation as a tedious and easily annoying man, but in this field he would have to deal with the greatest master of his kind. Abba even considered that the spectacle of their negotiation would be worth attending, with a few sweets and a good beer to wash it down.
However, he was pretty sure of one thing: she was from Earth. Since the start of the High Season’s Grand Market, he’d made the rounds, as he had in all previous years, of all the Slave Gardens and all the dealers’ cages, from the smallest to the richest, and he’d only found this one among the recently arrived captives who was clearly from Earth.
Jawaad wanted an Earth girl. He had never said what he was looking for or why. He’d never described to Abba the one he’d been looking for for years; he’d simply come when there might be one to see her, sometimes to observe her at length and study her closely. He hardly ever spoke to her, and had hardly never bought one. Abba, past his initial annoyance, had become curious. He was beginning to suspect what his boss wanted, and had finally gotten into the game, determined to one day find this rare female and discover what Jawaad had been looking for.
